Picasso Vandal Captured Red-Handed at Menil Collection

A video of a young man shown vandalizing Pablo Picasso’s painting Woman in a Red Armchair at the Menil Collection surfaced on YouTube recently and is making the rounds. The video captures the vandal in flagrante delicto by an amateur cellphone videographer as the vandal was stenciling an image of a bullfighter killing a bull, and the word “Conquista.”

According to the Houston Chronicle, which has a good report of the episode, the vandal, a self-described up-and-coming Mexican-American artist, stopped to tell the cell-phone-wielding person that he did it in the hopes of honoring Picasso’s work.

The painting, which was rushed to the conservation lab, where chief conservator Brad Epley swiftly went to work before the paint dried, is reported to have an “excellent prognosis.”